As the legislative elections approach, the resistance to pulling together on both the left and the right could buckle under the pressure of Le Pen's National Front. An analysis of last week's results by the polling institute csa suggests that Le Pen's forces could make it into the legislative election runoffs in 237 of France's 555 metropolitan constituencies — and in as many as 319 if he can forge an electoral coalition with Mégret's party. "The legislative elections aren't going to be a left/right battle," says Perrineau. "They're going to be a left/right/far-right battle." That equation ought to favor the left, but Perrineau's polls indicate that two-thirds of voters don't want another five years of cohabitation between Chirac as President and a leftist Parliament. And unless the Socialists quickly figure out a way to motivate voters in the wake of their loss in the presidential elections, they will have a hard time prevailing against Chirac's conservatives.

Just how hard a time? Some evidence will come on Sunday's presidential runoff. Though Chirac is all but assured of a resounding victory against Le Pen, he knows many of those votes will come by default. "For me and many others, it will be a heroic act to vote for Chirac," says Hélène Weil, 64, who runs a family law firm on Paris' Rue de Rivoli. Though she isn't out on the streets, she feels the same sense of shame for France that many of those protesters loudly profess. "We're the land of the Rights of Man, we were always on the frontline of political progress and justice," says Weil. "Now that image is weakened, and we're forced to vote for a man we don't respect just to save the Republic."

Cambadélis will be watching to see how many traditional adherents of the left will be able to stomach opting for the left's traditional enemy, even to head off an enemy of the Republic itself. "If the left doesn't vote massively for Chirac, it'll be a good sign for the left in the legislative elections," he says, since it would indicate a reservoir of voters for whom "Chirac's credibility is too damaged to represent French leadership against the FN. With its fundamental liberalism, the right can't reduce the strength of the FN. In those conditions, the country will look for a force that can really attack the problem."

But barring another cataclysmic surprise, the big challenge after Sunday will be to figure out exactly how to do that. If the left pulls together, the best it can hope for is another cohabitation under Chirac — a result that would keep France congealed in aspic for another five years. If the right wins, Chirac will have to take action on many fronts to which the political class has until now paid only lip service. "The success of Le Pen is due to the silence of the politicians on the problems of integration," says Zaïr Kédadouche, a former pro soccer player, president of the association Integration France and author of a new book on France's troubled relations with its 5 million Muslims. "Politicians better start telling the truth. It will take a lot of time and a lot of money."

In the end, it may prove no less difficult to reintegrate the 4.8 million people who voted for the National Front into the French body politic. Their leader is too untouchable and extreme to be tamed by being brought into government, an approach that is working fitfully on the rightists in Austria and Italy. But after Sunday, France's political élite will have to get off the ramparts and drop their ideological blinders. "If people don't realize that this is part of today's French society, if we go on demonstrating as if it was something that can be cut out like a cancer, then we have no chance of stopping it," says Askolovitch. France can and should reject Le Pen. But it is going to have to articulate and deliver a more credible option for the fifth of its voters who, having broken a taboo, aren't about to fade away.

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